The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,220 posts.
I have a side project to find the longest line of sight on the planet 1 using a novel Total Viewshed algorithm . At a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~92m x 92m), the planet contains around 4.5 billion elevation samples 2 . Now obviously we don’t need to calculate the visibility between literally every single one of…
In computer science, we often compare the efficiency of algorithms by describing their runtime as a function of the size of the input. Sorting is O(n * log(n)), meaning that sorting a list of N items takes an amount of time proportional to the number of items multiplied by its logarithm. Matrix multiplication is…
OpenAI recently released their open-weights model. Here we'll discuss how that inevitably leaks some information about their model training stack, and, on the way, show that GPT-5 was trained on phrases from adult websites....
How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
I set up my own VPS, documented every step, and ended up with a repeatable deployment pipeline. This is both a checklist for my future self and a guide for a...
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3 . I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap.
Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations.
My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.
When you resize, rotate, or in any way transform an image; or more generally when you resample some discrete signal, the software you are using must _interpolate_ between the discrete points to produce a result. Linear and cubic interpolation are easy to explain, but Lánczos interpolation, one of the most popular…
New context editing and memory tools enable Claude agents to handle long-running tasks without hitting context limits.
Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society, up from 34% in 2022.
It's normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement .
In this blog post, we walk through how to use Matrix Cores in HIP kernels, with a focus on low-precision data types such as FP16, FP8, and FP4, as well as the new family of Matrix Core instructions with exponent block scaling introduced in the AMD CDNA™4 architecture. Through code examples and illustrations, we…
The Financial Times reports that the U.K. is once again demanding that Apple create a backdoor into its encrypted backup services. The only change since the last time they demanded this is that the order is allegedly limited to only apply to British users. That doesn’t make it any better.The demand...
Every day, corporations track our movements through license plate scanners, building detailed profiles of where we go, when we go there, and who we visit. When they do this to us in violation of data privacy laws, we’ve suffered a real harm—period. We shouldn’t need to prove we’ve suffered...
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
Notes from setting up a truly minimal self-hosted email server with Postfix and OpenDKIM. Covers TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNS, reverse DNS, multiple domains, and delivering to Gmail.
Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As...
Nvidia's $110B vendor financing strategy mirrors Lucent's telecom bubble playbook. Analyzing customer concentration, GPU-backed debt, depreciation schedules & cash flow patterns to assess AI bubble risks.
A friend called me last week. Someone who’d built web applications back for a long time before moving exclusively to backend and infra work. He’d just opened a modern React codebase for the first time in over a decade.
The first project that I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low level software for the Silentype printer (see What Hath Woz Wrought ) , a cute, inexpensive thermal printer for the Apple II, that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion…
Using a decommissioned Alibaba cloud accelerator card as an FPGA dev board
Toyota organizes a car-hacking event that captivates participating students. We uncovered the important purpose behind the event. #TOYOTATIMES
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We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before...
Who owns the major VPN companies like Express, Nord, and Surfshark? We take you through an interactive map of the murky world of VPNs.
